How consultancy infantilises governments: Mariana Mazzucato and Rory Sutherland in conversation

Mariana Mazzucato is a professor in the economics of innovation and public value at University College London. She speaks to The Spectator’s Wiki Man, Rory Sutherland, about the book she has co-authored with Rosie Collington, The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilises our Governments and Warps our Economies. 

RORY SUTHERLAND: I’d like to start by congratulating you. The extraordinary growth in scale, wealth and influence of management consulting firms over the past 20 to 30 years is undoubtedly a phenomenon worthy of extensive investigation, particularly as it pertains to government contracts. We are effectively devolving decision-making to people who are doubly unelected in many cases and whose own interests may diverge fairly dramatically from the collective interest or the interest that government is supposed to be pursuing. So what fascinates me, working in an advertising agency, is that if I went to speak to Avis or UPS, I could plausibly comment on branding for those people but it would be an act of supreme hubris for me to waltz into those businesses on the basis of an Oxbridge degree in classics and claim to know more about car rental or transportation or distribution.